Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, January 16, 2001

As an elite group of Orthodox Jewish women in recent years climbed to ever greater heights of religious education, some among them began to ask whether Orthodox Judaism would allow them to reach the highest rung and earn the title of rabbi.

One feminist scholar, Haviva Ner-David, announced in a book that she was studying to be the first Orthodox female rabbi under the tutelage of a rabbi in Israel.

The Reform movement began ordaining women in 1972, the Conservative movement in 1985. But in Orthodoxy, the prospect of female rabbis is so controversial that many of the most accomplished women scholars insist they have no interest in seeking the title.

Now two Orthodox Jewish women have stepped forward in the pages of the newspaper, the Jewish Week, to say they have already been secretly ordained as rabbis.

One of them, Mimi Feigelson, said she had studied for ordination with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the songwriter and singer, and was ordained after he died in 1994 by a panel of three rabbis, whose names she refuses to make public.

The other woman, Eveline Goodman-Thau, said she was ordained in October in Jerusalem by Rabbi Jonathan Chipman, who told Jewish Week, "Sometimes there are situations in life in which something needs to be done but everyone's afraid to do it."

But the women appear to have knocked down the door to a house that will not yet admit them. No Orthodox synagogue has ever said it would accept a woman in the pulpit, and no Orthodox seminary has said it would recognize the women's ordination. Goodman-Thau told Jewish Week she was considering a job with a non- Orthodox congregation in Vienna, Austria.

Zevulun Charlop, dean of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, an affiliate of Yeshiva University, said, "Orthodoxy is guided by Halakha, Jewish law, which is very emphatic about ordination, and ordination is reserved for men and not for women, since beginning with Moses."

Rabbi Steven M. Dworken, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America, an Orthodox group, said, "If they really wanted Halakhic approbation, they would have gone to the chief rabbi of Israel and asked. But they didn't, and so one has to assume that they did not ask because established Orthodox Judaism would give them a negative answer.

"This smacks of innovations of Reform and Conservative Judaism, which would not be acceptable."

Ner-David, 31, who grew up in suburban New Rochelle, N.Y., said the barriers to women's ordination were in Orthodox culture, not in Jewish law. She said she had considered leaving Orthodoxy, but decided against it.

"I don't identify as a Conservative Jew, and I don't want to officially leave the Orthodox movement, which is what I would need to do to become a Conservative rabbi," she said. "I care about the Orthodox world, grew up in it,

and am in many ways identified with it."

She is studying in Israel at the Pardes Institute with Rabbi Aryeh Strikovsky, who said in an interview there were precedents in Jewish history for Orthodox women as rabbis. He said he intended to give Ner-David smicha, or ordination, when she finished her studies.

But Strikovsky said he would probably consult with his colleagues to find a respectful title for her other than rabbi.

"The word 'rabbi' in Hebrew is for a man only," he said, "unless there will be some revolution in the Hebrew language."